New York City Real Estate Heir Is Acquitted of Murder in Texas

Robert A. Durst, the New York multimillionaire who admitted that he had butchered his 71-year-old neighbor's body with a bow saw and dumped the parts into Galveston Bay, was acquitted of the man's murder on Tuesday. Mr. Durst told the jury that despite what happened afterward, the killing itself had been accidental and an act of self-defense.

For many in the courtroom, it was a surprise ending to a strange trial. When a bailiff read the verdict, in a scene televised live nationally, Mr. Durst, who had faced up to 99 years in prison, looked stunned, his mouth agape as he gazed upward. A tight smile spread across his face. Moments later, he hugged his defense lawyers, softly saying, ''Thank you, so much.''

In a certain sense, the verdict was no more unlikely than anything else heard over six weeks of testimony: a troubled multimillionaire, described by his lawyers as suffering from mild autism, living on the cheap disguised as a woman; the unsolved disappearance of his first wife; the unsolved murder of his confidante in Los Angeles; a secret second marriage; a fatal shooting and a grisly cover-up; a nationwide manhunt that ended with a shoplifting arrest.

Members of the jury, which deliberated over four days, said at a news conference after the verdict was read that there were holes in Mr. Durst's story, but that ultimately the prosecution had failed to prove that he deliberately murdered his neighbor, Morris Black. ''The defense told us a story and stuck to it,'' said Chris Lovell, a juror. ''The D.A. gave us multiple scenarios of what may have happened.''

A friend said that Mr. Durst told him in a telephone conversation on Monday night that the best he could hope for was a hung jury.

On the witness stand, Mr. Durst said that in November 2000, he fled New York for Galveston, a city of 57,000 people at the end of Interstate 45, because he learned that Jeanine F. Pirro, the Westchester County district attorney, had reopened an investigation into his first wife's disappearance. He said he had feared she would indict him unfairly to further her own political ambitions. Disguised as a mute woman, Mr. Durst rented an apartment for $300 a month and disappeared among the drifters and homeless wanderers of Galveston.

Mr. Durst testified that he hated the wig he wore and soon abandoned his disguise. Mr. Black, a cantankerous former seaman, lived across the hall. Although Mr. Black frequently got into arguments with strangers and neighbors, Mr. Durst said he and his neighbor became fast friends, watching television together and target shooting. But he said Mr. Black had fired a pistol twice while visiting his apartment, much to his horror.

On Sept. 28, 2001, Mr. Durst said, he returned to his apartment shortly before dawn and found Mr. Black watching television. He said he had raced into the kitchen, where he discovered that his .22-caliber handgun was no longer in its hiding place. He turned to see Mr. Black reaching for the weapon underneath a jacket and swinging toward him, Mr. Durst said. ''I was concerned that Morris was going to shoot the gun, most likely at my face,'' he told the jury.

He testified that they had struggled and the gun had gone off in Mr. Black's face, killing him.

Afraid that no one would believe his story, Mr. Durst testified, he panicked. In a haze of drugs and alcohol, he said, he carved up Mr. Black's body until he was ''swimming in blood.'' He triple-wrapped the body parts in garbage bags and dumped them in the bay, where they were found bobbing in the water. Mr. Black's head has never been found.

Mr. Durst was arrested and charged with murder, but he later jumped bail, fleeing by car to Pennsylvania, where he was captured after taking a Band-Aid, a chicken salad sandwich and a newspaper from a supermarket. He still faces charges of bail-jumping, a felony, and remains in jail. Prosecutors said they did not plan to charge him with abuse of a corpse, a misdemeanor.

None of his friends or family were in the courtroom today. His wife, Debrah Lee Charatan, has avoided Galveston since the trial started in August. His most loyal friends, Stewart and Emily Altman, had returned to their home in Long Island. He has long been estranged from his family, who refused his requests to come to Galveston.

''Thank God,'' Mrs. Altman said in a telephone interview. ''There was no evidence Bob did anything wrong.''

Mr. Durst's lawyers, Dick DeGuerin, Mike Ramsey and Chip Lewis, said they were gratified by the verdict. Mr. DeGuerin congratulated the jury for setting aside ''what happened after'' the shooting and focusing on how Mr. Black had died. As for the dismemberment, he said, ''Bob was horrified at some of the things he did.''

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Kurt Sistrunk, the district attorney in Galveston County, said he was ''dismayed, disappointed'' by the verdict.

Neither the defense nor the prosecution wanted to ask the jury to consider lesser charges like manslaughter. ''This wasn't a case for compromise,'' Mr. DeGuerin said.

Mr. Sistrunk agreed. ''We were looking at all or nothing,'' he said

Galveston's reputation as the Wall Street of the South faded into history long ago. But Mr. Durst grew up close to the real thing, a member of Manhattan's real estate royalty. He is the oldest son of the late Seymour B. Durst, a real estate developer who built skyscrapers along Third Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas.

Despite having ''more money than I could possibly spend,'' Mr. Durst testified that he had few friends and a mediocre academic record. He said he suffered from bulimia and had been devastated when his mother fell or jumped from the roof of the family's Scarsdale home when he was 7. He acknowledged lying to friends and family members when he told them that he had a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California in Los Angeles.

Mr. Durst reluctantly joined the family business in the 1970's, after marrying Kathleen McCormack, a dental hygienist living in a Durst building. He did not fit in well in real estate society; he flouted convention by belching in public or smoking marijuana at social functions, friends and acquaintances said.

His first brush with the authorities came in 1982, when he walked into a Manhattan police station saying he had not seen his wife, Kathleen, in five days. He said he had dropped her off at a train station after the couple had dinner at their weekend home in Westchester County. But there were contradictions and discrepancies in his account. And Kathleen Durst had told many friends, ''If anything happens to me, don't let him get away with it,'' said one of them, Marion Watlington.

But the case soon faded from the headlines.

In 1994, Mr. Durst told friends he felt betrayed when his father anointed his younger brother, Douglas, to run the family empire, the Durst Organization, a privately held billion-dollar company. But in Galveston, Mr. Durst testified that he was actually relieved by his father's decision. Nevertheless, he broke with his family, refusing to attend his father's funeral in 1995.

For the next five years, Mr. Durst crisscrossed the country, living in luxurious homes in Trinidad and San Francisco, Dallas, New York and Connecticut. In 1999, a state police investigator, Joseph Becerra, got a tip that led him to reopen the investigation into Kathleen Durst's disappearance months before she was to graduate from medical school. Mr. Durst claimed that newspaper articles about the investigation had prompted his flight to Galveston.

In December 2000, he also secretly married Ms. Charatan, a New York real estate agent who had a longtime relationship with him, though the two have rarely lived together.

Mr. Durst was back in the news when his friend and confidante, Susan Berman, a writer, was found dead that same month in her Los Angeles home, shot in the back of the head. At the time, New York investigators said they had put her name on a list of people to be interviewed because she had acted as Mr. Durst's informal spokeswoman at the time his first wife disappeared.

Mrs. Pirro has assigned a squad of investigators to Kathleen Durst's case and told witnesses that she was prepared to indict Mr. Durst, according to two people interviewed by the prosecutors' office, although it was a circumstantial case. So far, no charges have been filed. Mrs. Pirro released a statement on Tuesday saying the Galveston verdict would have no effect on her investigation.

The brother of the missing woman, James McCormack, said in a telephone interview from New Jersey that he was shocked by the verdict. ''How can 12 people who heard and saw the evidence agree that he was not guilty?'' he asked.

Correction: November 13, 2003, Thursday A front-page article yesterday about the acquittal of Robert A. Durst, the New York real estate heir, in a Texas murder trial misstated the form in which the jury's verdict was delivered. A bailiff took it from the foreman and passed it to the judge, who read it aloud; the bailiff did not announce it.